Donny Nelson
McKenzie County, North Dakota

My family and I have been farming and ranching in McKenzie County, located in western North Dakota where we have dealt with the benefits and the pitfalls of being located between two oil and gas fields for over 50 years. Our family has farmed and ranched here since the early 1900s, when my grandparents homesteaded here. We are located between two oil fields, the Antelope Creek to the north and the Blue Butte field to the south of us. We own land and have government grazing rights to run cattle in the Little Missouri National Grasslands in both fields. We have had oil and gas development on our ranch since exploration and development began in North Dakota in the mid-1950s. There is not a time that I can remember not having to deal with the oil and gas industry.

In Western North Dakota and across the country, we are fighting to coexist with the oil and gas industry. Over the years, we’ve dealt with hydrogen sulfide emissions, seismic damage, oil and salt water spills, reclamation problems, and too many other issues to list. I am 42 years old and there are many sites or “temporarily abandoned wells” on our place that I can never remember having a rig on or producing and have yet to be reclaimed.

We cannot access and use any of these unreclaimed lands. I am still in contact with companies who have left the land unreclaimed, but they are moving very slow. While the companies stall, the ranch is losing money because the land is either unusable or lacks the same productivity as before oil and gas development.

Another problem is that, when agricultural land is disturbed, often the damages are not realized until after the next harvest. Although federal law requires that landowners over federal minerals are compensated for lost crops and forage, and state law requires compensation for lost agricultural production and income, it is difficult to win fair compensation for lost productivity of the land, and even harder to minimize damages in the first place and get land reclaimed in a timely way.